As Bitcoin (BTC) Hits $40,000, Grayscale Sees Rising Interest From Pension Funds and Endowments

In a massive crypto market rally, Bitcoin (BTC) price surged all the way to $40,000 hitting a new all-time high. The massive rally came on Thursday, January 7 when BTC added $5000 to its price in a single day moving from under $35K to all the way up to $40K.

Also, with the current price rally, BTC extends its weekly as well as year-to-date gains to more than 30%. Another important milestone that Bitcoin (BTC) has achieved over a $700 billion market cap almost the size of Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).

While all this excitement continues, one thing that remains constant about Bitcoin is the rising institutional interest! The world’s biggest Bitcoin asset manager Grayscale continues to see major interest coming from big market players. Grayscale Investments LLC’s newly appointed CEO Michael Sonnenshein said that they are seeing a huge interest recently from pension funds and endowments.

“We’ve started to see participation not just from the hedge fund segment, which we’ve long seen participation from, but now it’s recently from other institutions, pensions and endowments. The sizes of allocations they are making are growing rapidly as well,” he said.

Making The Grayscale Brand Similar to Pimco and Vanguard

Grayscale has engineered out a smart way of letting investors gain exposure to cryptocurrencies without directly buying them. The digital asset manager packs cryptocurrencies as shares of the trust and sells those shares to investors. The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) is one of the biggest Bitcoin funds currently with more than $23 billion in assets under management. GBTC currently holds nearly 3% of the total Bitcoin (BTC) supply or 607.27K BTCs under management.

01/07/21 UPDATE: Net Assets Under Management, Holdings per Share, and Market Price per Share for our Investment Products.

Total AUM: $27.4 billion$BTC $BCH $ETH $ETC $ZEN $LTC $XLM $XRP $ZEC pic.twitter.com/Z3Q1EZXGeg

— Grayscale (@Grayscale) January 7, 2021

Apart from Bitcoin (BTC), Grayscale has several other cryptocurrency products under the belt with net assets under management at $27 billion. But as we can see the GBTC alone contributes 85% of its total crypto holdings.

Sonnenshein has already played an instrumental role in bringing new investors and expand its offerings. In an interview with Fortune, he said that as the CEO, he plans to bring more crypto products to Grayscale and further strengthen the brand. “I want to make Grayscale synonymous with digital investing like Pimco is with fixed income and Vanguard is with index funds,” he said.